Tag Archives: reflections

Being a Writer

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Recently it has been brought to my attention that some persons of my acquaintance are under the impression that I intend to grow up and earn my living as a writer.  (Wow. That’s what they call “one gadawful” sentence. I solemnly swear never to write it again.) If what one means by “writer” is someone who pokes insistently at ideas and stories and words and phrases till they learn to do his bidding, then I suppose I already am one. If, however, one means someone who has a desk and a computer and an agent and a publisher, who lives off of royalties and, with shining eyes, tells interviewers that this is all he ever wanted to do, then I will never be that. At this point, I would only strive to get published to earn the pleasure of writing an acknowledgements page. Let me tell you about it.

Here is an exact transcript of my very first story, written at about age five and magnanimously typed by one of my parents:

Casha and Hantum

By Alice Hodgkins

I

Casha was walking on the street and she saw…a handsome young man. And he looked at Casha. Then, when the cars went, he walked across the street.

II

“What is your name?” he said.

“Casha.”

“My name is Hantum.”

“Hi, Hantum. Can you come in my vehicle to my house?”

“Yes, I can.”

III

“Into the car.” said Casha

“Here we are! Let’s go to a dance.” said Hantum.

“I agree,” said Casha.

IV

When they came home, Hantum said “I love you, Casha.”

“I do too.” said Casha. And they got married.

The End

You can see that even then I had talent. Such grasp of plot—the conflict of the moving cars solved by mere, raw patience. Such intriguing characterization—Casha’s mobster sensibilities and ardent self-love. Such mastery of symbolism—glorification of those virtuous descriptors, Casual and Handsome.

I don’t remember writing much more than that as a young kid besides a romantic farcical drama called “Cambino and Calabria,” and another slighty trippy work entitled “The Baby,” but by eighth grade I considered stories appropriate Christmas presents for my friends. As I remember, Sarah Tate got one about a Dodo bird. Sorry, Sarah. That year I also wrote a short story which I originally named “Nanny Arp,” but in ninth grade I retitled it “How Nanny Went on Holiday and What Came of it,” and sent it into a contest for high-schoolers at nearby Salem College. I won first prize. They published it in their literary magazine, and gave me a certificate, $100, a t-shirt, and a lifetime supply of admissions mailings. The News and Record interviewed me and wrote a human interest article. Fred Chappell, the poet laureate of North Carolina and a friend of my parents’ sent me a congratulatory post card with a cow on it, which hung on my wall till I took it down two weeks ago to repaint. It was so great.

On a contest-high, I found something called The Tweener Time International Chapter Book Contest. High-schoolers writing for tweeners. Hooray! I entered it both freshman and sophomore year. My first entry was called The Everyday Kind of Magic, and was a very free retelling of Hansel and Gretel, involving a sandbox. I wrote it while going through a phase when I capitalized all Truly Important words, but every chapter was lovingly titled and epigraphed. It made it to the semi-finals, and I’m still quite fond it.

It was at about this point, that I bought myself a 2008 Children’s Writer’s and Illustrator’s Market. It still sits on my shelf, but I’ve become very good at forgetting its existence. Besides, I only have one rejection letter to show for my pains.

My second submission to Tweener Time was called The Society for the Previously Lost. I may rework it sometime just because the title’s so darn good. My favorite scene involves a little street girl drowning in a mountain of flour, and being rescued by a formerly whiny no-good named Leland who carries her nearly lifeless body home across half the kingdom. The chapter is called “Of Dungeons, Towers, and Peril.” I bet you wish you had written it. In any case, this one didn’t advance past the first round and I decided I didn’t need any more extra-large t-shirts proclaiming “I Wrote a Book for Tweener Time International Chapter Book Competition.”

But junior year I took creative writing as an elective. Because I was already so used to writing novellas I wrote a third entitled Jenny at Theodore House. It was a very sixteen-year-old sort of story, but it had some nice passages, and the house was truly magnificent. I love houses.

When I write stories, you see, I write not what I know but what I want. I look back on all the shabby notebooks containing plans and half-plans for stories and find multiple family-trees, maps and floorplans. The Ptomeys, Ingotville, the Kimbles, the Hardisons,  Ecnelis, the Bonglers, Earickson School, and the Macreadys. It doesn’t just take a village to raise a child. It takes a village to do anything of worth. I think back to my high school writing efforts and I remember the hundreds of times teachers turned a blind eye when I wrote during class, the insistence with which Brittany demanded to read every story though she never liked any of them, the eagerness with which Tim marked up each of my sixty-page novellas, the passion with which Hannah asserted that I was her favorite author, the patience with which my sister typed even the stories with the weirdest names, and the care and brilliance with which my parents gave feedback. They all loved that I was writing—friends urged me to “put them in.” Even those who weren’t readers understood the way in which story was a portal to elsewhere, to more, and they wanted to stake their own small claim in its creation.

Late in high school, maybe senior year, I began a new story which included a couple of my more persistent characters, Michael Dies and Happy Eve. I wrote up a few pages of planning which included every detail of the animal population, prepared myself with a little Langston Hughes, and then began.

When Someday Came

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

It was certainly not Miss Prentice’s doing that Michael ever read the poem, so, to be sure, she cannot be blamed for everything that happened. It was not her fault that Lena came to town or that Ernestine spent three days in the marshes, and it certainly wasn’t her fault about Mrs. Herbert’s petunias. The petunias could be traced directly back to Linus, but nobody could be mad at him anyway.

I suppose I shall begin at the beginning or it shall be confusing. This story takes place in the little village of Shepland up in the mountains. Nobody knew for sure why there was a town there at all. All the mountains had to offer were thin air and lots of trees…

Now that’s a story I ought to finish. You see, writing is not the distant pipe dream. Writing, itself, is dreaming.

Alice Sans Swing: A Rather Lengthy Entry

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This afternoon, I was at Emily’s house trying to get all my Faerie Queene read, and as Edmund Spenser and I have a little trouble understanding each other, it wasn’t going swimmingly. I stared out her back window at the brick house settled in the snow in the lot behind her. It looked so much like home. Not my home, you know, but home. I started to think about where I wished I was, and the answer came with an almost unhealthy quickness. I wished I was standing in my dining room on a July day at about 5:30. The sun was shining at angle in through the Windexed front door onto the perfectly warped mirror in front of me, the sideboard smelled of Pledge. (How I love my mother!) Then into the kitchen, and the wood floor under my bare feet went from flat to a hilly shine. Everything there was warm and smelled of marinade and red wine. My mummy handed me a pan of wrapped corn on the cob to take out to my dad. Through the laundry room, feet skimming over the tattered rubber threshold, the sound of Daddy’s voice saying to Mr. Wolff, “You know, it’s interesting…” as he gestured largely with a huge pair of tongs. The deliciously uncontrolled slam of the screen door behind me and I was teetering down the rough grey steps which I painted myself onto a rougher patio. I handed the platter over, and was called “Sweetheart” for my pains. I wandered onto the grass, green and sinking, half listening to the laughter behind me. Those two entertained each other like no other. The smoke followed me, smelling of steak and unspoilt backyard. I didn’t mind. “Smoke follows beauty,” my mom always said. I reached for the swing, lifted my knee to brace it against the  weathered blue board–and then I remembered. The swing was gone. The tree was gone. I could not go back.

My first memory (perhaps fabricated, but I prefer not to think like that) is of my father tying bricks to the end of a rope, and throwing them over a limb of our biggest oak tree. He was making a swing. That swing could’ve told more stories than I can, and you can really get me going. We all received ritual lumps on our heads from being swung into when we were a couple years old, and had our hands filled with prickles from a particularly bad rope. Mary had a tomato dropped on her head while she swung, Hannah threw up after trying a new technique, and it displayed a penchant for breaking while I stood on it. Oh, how we loved it. We played Circus and Person and did Merrygorounds and Tornados and Tomatoes and Underdoggies. We snuck seconds on it before church in the mornings, and stayed out long after dark, piffling over turns, and dodging dangerously back and forth in the full glow from the porch floodlight. I knew why I had such a wonderful house: the grown-ups who came to visit liked the wood stove we heated with, even though they didn’t know that if you threw water on it it would make fascinatingly bulbous clouds of steam, and the kids who came, well, the swing was worth skipping dessert. Mary and I had a strong sense of proprietorship which we shared with the Wolffs and the Nealons, because it was a truth universally acknowledged that Hannah gave the best Merrygorounds, and Rosie was the only one who had touched the tree. The swing was the center of our world.

To me, I think it was more than that. All of the euphoria ended naturally as we slowly grew up, of course. Friends still loved it, we still took turns in order, but we did not spend hours. There were no more games. I didn’t mind, though. My best moments on the swing were the wondering, dreamy ones. It was a good for a think. I never sat. I always stood, facing the parking lot, and nudged my hips side to side to side until I was flying. I sang and recited poems quite loudly, I had conversations with people who did not happen to be present, I leaned forward into the wind (though I’d never even heard of Titanic,) I was a princess and the world was mine.

One weekend, the spring of my senior year, my parents were out of town and a bunch of friends came over. We started dinner, then responsibly abandoned it simmering on the stove. We took careful turns on the swing and gave each other pushes. We laughed a lot. A couple weeks later I sat in the upstairs bath at about eleven when there was a sound like thunder. It was a slow, deafening crackling right outside my window. It ended in the most deafening silence. Finally, I hauled myself out of the water, put on a robe, and went outside to see. My parents stood silently in the driveway. There were no words. The big tree filled our large backyard like a bowl. (That’s the way I described it to everyone for weeks–“like a bowl.”) It had been struck by lightning years and years before, and we’d had to have half of the top removed. Apparently the core had rotted out anyway. It was the quietest of nights. There was no other explanation. The fallen trunk, which was at least twenty feet around, lead straight to our neighbor’s back fence like a highway. I was suddenly crushed to know that the baby oak leaves waving in the breeze, whose arrival meant spring at last, were already dying as I watched. And then I knew. My swing was gone. It was unreal. I began to cry. My parents hugged me and said scary, wasn’t it?  I said not particularly, went upstairs and crawled into my sister’s empty bed. I pressed my face into the fan that propped the window open, and bawled myself to sleep. I would be eighteen in a couple weeks and it felt as if my world had promptly ended when all I was trying to do was take a bath.

Anyway, I did not quite make my quota with the Faerie Queene this afternoon. I went downstairs, began to tell Emily about the swing, and suddenly I was crying–not prettily and quietly, but messily and swollenly. I am not over it. I am angry that now, when my father grills steak in July, there is no place for the smoke to follow me. As I got older, I think, and I climbed onto the swing less and less, I loved it more and more. It became sacred. It became, in itself, “a spot of time.” It was magic because when I climbed onto it, even at thirteen, I became beautiful. I was beautiful because of something that was not me. I could give no credit to myself, only to that half-second of weightlessness when the swing changed directions and ceased, momentarily, to carry me. Now, there is a gorgeous little flowerbed where the swing hung, and stump of the tree is a huge, odd island. I cannot go back. I cannot, I cannot. Anyway, sorry this is so long. It’s just that I miss spring, I miss my home, I miss my swing.